Didn't really lose my job per se...however, I did have an unintentional quit not too long ago.

Honestly, at first it was hard...I got married the same week that I lost my job followed by a 5 day honeymoon(not going to lie, a week in Jamaica was fantastic after being so stressed), so there was a lot going on. I was also suffering from some degree of burnout after averaging around 70 hours per week for several months, including some weeks that may have gone over 100 hours(I was salaried, so I didn't keep records of the exact number of hours worked each week).

I scheduled things that needed to be done around my house and did some work on the house myself to prepare for winter the first couple of weeks after I got back from my honeymoon. I barely even looked at a computer for about a month total. It was clear I needed a reset, so that's what I did.

First, I did a bit of a post mortem on my previous two jobs. I asked what went well and what didn't. The easy way out would have been to just blame my former employer and move on, but that wasn't my M.O. for the post mortem. I'm actually considering writing a post on the whole process because it is too long to go through here.

Second, I assessed what I thought of as MY shortcomings. How did I contribute to the situation I found myself in, either directly or indirectly? I felt that my front end dev skills could use some shoring up as they had never really been fully developed previously and also had atrophied over time in my previous job from lack of front end work. I had been working primarily on business logic and data access, along with a soul crushing number of meetings on a daily basis (gotta love working for big corporations).

Third, I set about correcting what I thought of as my shortcomings by revisiting some of the basic front end technologies and working with front end frameworks. Just coding up things for fun to get a handle on some of the things I had missed out on.

Also during this time, I made what some would probably say was a questionable decision, I shut down on social media and wasn't taking any job offers. In short, I became a coding hermit for a while. I could have taken the easy way out here too and just took whatever .NET job offer came my way instead of really considering where I want my career to go.

The biggest question I asked myself during this time was this: where do I want my career to go and how do I get there from here?

I'm actually still asking myself this question because of all the factors involved. I've somewhat figured out the "where" portion of the question. Which is that I would strongly prefer doing project based contract or freelance work, whether that happens now or some time in the future remains to be seen. I'd prefer to work from home given that I estimate that I am about 3x more productive there than I am in an office (working without interruption allows me to focus far better) and I like being able to just jump on my workstation in the middle of the night to code a solution I came up with.

The "How" portion is more complex. Do I try taking freelance work and build up to larger projects? Do I take a position with a company for a couple(or more) years to strengthen the skills I have been working on? That all depends on what comes up in the not too distant future.